Hannah Arendt Quotes

Who dares not speak his free thoughts is a slave.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?

It’s really very hard to tell people to think at work but not at home.

The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it.

I hate to tell people what they should think 'cause I really have an aversion when people tell me what to think.

To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.

I've always been very liberal when it comes to people thinking for themselves.

I think that when we start thought-policing people and idea-policing people, then that's crossing a line. And I think, you know, everybody's so afraid of this imaginary line of thought police that they forget their own personal safety.

Well, where there is freedom doubt itself must be free.

Nobody told me how to talk or think.

I need to be free, to speak the unspeakable. You can't do that in office.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

The policy of repression of ideas cannot work and has never worked.

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.

Ideas are dangerous; and the traffic in them has been the concern of all dictators.

Of all the tyrannies of humankind, the worst is that which persecutes the mind.

An attempt to scrutinize men’s thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought.

Do not allow the Church or the State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.

There shall be no slavery of the mind.

By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

I require no bayonets to defend the liberty of my thoughts.

The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.